Okay, truthfully now … if you had penned some of the titles
listed below, would you really want your name to go down in literary history as
being the author? “John Dexter” is only one of the numerous pseudonyms used by
the friendly folks at Greenleaf Publications, and it was used throughout the
many labels mentioned in the previous “Oddity.”

My reference books (see the BookScans Reference Library)
insinuate that the average fee for writing a book for Greenleaf in the early
sixties was about a thousand dollars; which, if you stop and think about it, was
enough to pay a month’s rent, buy some groceries, and maybe have enough left
over to take your honey out on a date or two. In other words, if a struggling
writer in Southern California (or elsewhere) needed to make ends meet, this was
certainly a way to get a little quick cash … anonymously … while working to
write that “legitimate” novel or screenplay.

Listed below are some of the most-used Greenleaf pseudonyms and a
list of authors who sometimes used them.

HOWEVER, just because an author is known to have used a
particular pseudonym does NOT mean that he wrote extensively under that name.
For example, one recognized “John Dexter” author was Lawrence Block, but he (so
far as I know) has only acknowledged one soft-porn novel under that pseudonym
(it’s Midnight Reader 471, Shame Dame, shown below). There may
well have been others, but we’re probably never going to know for sure. Even so,
this will give you some idea about the sheer number of writers who engaged in
putting out this sort of literature. The identities of the true authors for the
vast, vast majority of these books are unknown.

The Novels of
John Dexter (by book number)

(Note: some of these may not be Greenleaf books. The authors
carried the pseudonym over to other publishers.)